The Blitz Team

Context

Deployment pipelines had become slow and fragile over several years of accumulated technical debt. Deployments required manual steps, caused frequent rollbacks, and were taking multiple hours. A growing backlog of infrastructure improvements had no home — squads were too focused on product delivery to address it.

Challenge

The risk was that forming a dedicated team would be perceived as pulling engineering resource from product work. I needed to demonstrate the ROI quickly to maintain organisational support.

Approach

I assembled a small, senior team — the Blitz Team — with a fixed mandate: no product work, only deployment reliability and backlog reduction. I set a three-month horizon with clear success metrics agreed upfront. The team worked in short cycles, shipped improvements continuously, and reported progress publicly each week to build momentum.

Outcome

Deployment time dropped substantially. The backlog of infrastructure improvements was cleared. The public weekly updates built credibility across the org and the model was used again later for other targeted improvement efforts.